Workers’ rights must be prioritised during bilateral talks
Govt must straighten out the kinks to ensure smooth transition
We must learn from history
IT is the same old story of angry men returning home dejected at not being able to get tickets. And the sufferings of those planning to travel home to enjoy Eid with family and friends keep on recurring every year with, it seems, an ascending intensity. And their haplessness and misery continue to remain unmitigated, with no one really caring to do anything of note to see an end to the terrible situation confronting the home goers.
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ON September 10, Awami League lawmaker Saber Hossain Chowdhury moved two private members' bills in the House, one styled Oppression and Custodial Deaths (Prevention) Bill 2009, and the other Eviction of Slum Dwellers from Government Land (Prevention) Bill 2009.
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ABOUT a decade ago, a group of researchers was observing a primary school classroom in the US. The second graders were talking about Lake Michigan and water pollution in and around it. One of them innocently enquired: "Who owns the water?"
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TIME is ticking -- less than 90 days -- towards the 15th conference of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Copenhagen (COP15) for adopting a new protocol, replacing the Kyoto Protocol, which will expire in 2012. A total of 8,000 people -- government officials, NGOs, journalists, and others -- from 170 countries are expected in COP15 (December 7 18).
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IF pictures speak a thousand words than the photograph appearing recently in this newspaper of a boy pulling ropes at a rope factory have spoken more than a thousand words and very poignantly so. To any sensitive person the sight of an underage boy, labouring in hazardous conditions, and that too for a pittance, must evoke the most contemptuous reaction, as it does in us.
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HE was truly a monarch in his realm of melody. For Baul Samrat Shah Abdul Karim, music was all. It was music that welled up in the soul and remained evocative of the soul. Now that he is dead at ninety three, the music becomes a memory and the man rises to a crescendo of transcendence in the human consciousness. It would be superfluous to suggest that Shah Abdul Karim is now set to become a legend, for legend is what he rose to being in all the years of his striving for the Creator, for his land, indeed for the universe. There is something about baul music that takes its notes, its inflections and its nuances toward a wider space; and doing so, it resonates in the hearts of those who feel it brought to them on the waves of the wind. Karim sang in the fields, under the trees and on...
NOTWITHSTANDING continuing woes and setbacks, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party's (BNP) political prospects have, off late, brightened thanks to the growing frustration over the incumbent AL's performance, which is depressing at the least.
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IN an inter-ministerial meeting attended by representatives of the finance and foreign ministries as well as from the Office of the Comptroller and Auditor General, discrepancies in travel claims made by officials have been revealed. The fares claimed were rates quoted from the IATA fare chart that differed widely from the competitive market prices at which tickets are sold by the airlines or their sales agents to customers.
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THE worries expressed by the United Nations about the fate of two of its employees held without charge in Sri Lanka since last June are a reflection of what may have been going wrong in that country. Since the defeat of the Tamil Tigers, certain moves by the government of President Mahinda Rajapakse have given rise to concerns in the international community about whether the administration is really building a structure of peace. The government has won the war. When it vanquished Velupillai Prabhakaran and his LTTE, it was expected that it would move fast and decisively to build a society based on reconciliation between the majority Sinhala and the minority Tamils. That clearly has not happened. As many as 280,000 Tamils, all of them inhabiting areas earlier controlled by the Tamil...
